I loved HyperCard. Using it you really felt like you were building something of consequence - it was pretty magical to go from simple word processing to this in one model leap of a school computer.
Not sure how much this happens in practice anymore - any smart utility is going to use your solar / house battery to cover their spikes and reduce overall costs so they don’t have to keep an old dormant coal plant on the books for the Super Bowl. At least, that’s what I’d expect from my utility.
I think it's mostly for cases where people get 95% of the energy from solar but stay connected to the grid. The fixed costs of a house's connection to the grid are roughly constant, but historically utilities amortized it in their energy prices. We saw something similar in my area during the California droughts when people were "too good" at conserving water, but I guess a lot of the infra costs don't scale linearly with usage
I don’t believe they will. They will be thrown out soon enough and hard - but the incumbents will fight like hell to make sure people’s voices are silenced, diluted, or not counted.
Through the magic of serendipity it just so happens that the states that decide for us happen to be MI, WI, and PA and so this concept of backlashes is quite amusing. Tech workers live in a bubble away from these states minus Philly.
We’ve been digging ourselves a giant AI-inflated hole in the economy for months and folks have just been playing musical chairs to grab as much money as possible before the music stops.
Hard to believe it’s taken this long. I never wanted to live through the late 70s / early 80s economically but I guess I’ll have my chance!
I hate to break it to, you but AI is not the reason why the numbers are down. AI makes everyone productive - for every engineer that is laid off due to AI from big tech, that person still has skills that when coupled with AI makes them eligible for slightly lower paying job.
The reason the numbers are down should be pretty obvious.
Unexpectedly is because it's a big miss from the projected job numbers. If you felt like the expected numbers were obviously wrong for this month, you should have traded on that information.
There isn’t really a distinction day to day on this in practice. It covers everybody - just easier to say than all the official titles and typically for morale helps to carry the name all the way to the back office to connect to what’s happening at the pointy end.
Are we in "A Brand Age" or does The Brand Age occur only in different spaces after a technology becomes ubiquitous and like a utility, so the only way to command a premium is branding?
What things are not quite there but will have their Brand Age next? AI? Spaceships?
I'm also a bit confused as to whether there's judgment in the article though. He's applauding branding as a survival technique, but also saying it's silly and vestigial. So if we find ourselves in a Brand Age because we've succeeded in solving the last really hard problem we should... drop everything and find another problem so we can move it into the Brand Age?
Either way - thoughts were provoked so thx for that.
My crackpot theory: USB chargers and cables. Right now, a quality USB charger is cheap, but it's indistinguishable from a shitty USB charger, and there's a practical difference. And it's frequently on your desk. And it's got a lot of space for branding. A luxury USB cable would be identifiable and also (hopefully) also work well for whatever you might plug it into, until they invent the next new USB standard.
Of course, there are downsides. Nobody's gonna just walk away with your watch, but a cable on your desk that also costs $1000? And also, a lot of us would look at your diamond-encrusted USB adapter and think "this man is a moron."
For $99.95, you can own an exquisite 0.75m USB-C 2.0 "High-Definition Audio Cable" [1], featuring "high-purity 0.5% Silver conductors and a Metal-Layer Noise-Dissipation for the most efficient dissipation of radio-frequency noise."
It has "Direction-Controlled Conductors: All drawn metal strands or conductors have a non-symmetrical, and therefore directional, grain structure. AudioQuest controls the resulting RF impedance variation so that noise is drained away from where it will cause distortion. The correct direction is determined by listening to every batch of metal conductors used in every AudioQuest audio cable. When applicable, arrows are clearly marked on the connectors to ensure superior sound quality." Power Delivery: No. Country of origin: China.
My web search didn't reveal any $1000 USB cables - doubtless those are offered only privately to the most discerning connoisseurs.
I’ve been doing this with a tmux tunnel and an app on my laptop that connects sessions you select to a virtual terminal using sockets. I asked Claude to build it and it works great - full terminal functionality and Markdown review with comments so you don’t need to cross your eyes to review plans.
Excited to see how this matures so people without that inclination can also be constantly pestered by the nagging idea that someone, somewhere is being more productive than them :)
In the meantime they will be quite a bit slower I’d imagine.
Also wonder if those seniors will ever get to actually do any engineering themselves now that they’re the bottleneck. :)
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